Latest Technology

What is this, a laptop for ants!? Today Oppo launched the Find N5 , the thinnest book-style foldable phone yet, but there’s more to the phone than a slim design: it’s capable of connecting to a Mac for file transfers and even remote control. It’s not quite the first Android phone to do so, but it is the only one you can buy outside of China. To link the Find N5 with a Mac you first have to install Oppo’s O Plus Connect app on the Mac, which will be available from Oppo’s website — I’ve been testing out a beta version. Linking the Mac to the phone is quick so long as they’re on the same Wi-Fi network, with all the phone’s controls built into the “Connection & sharing” section of its Settings app. As long as the two phones remain on the same network, you can browse the phone’s files directly from the Mac and transfer them wirelessly — in itself a coup, given that even wired file-sharing between Android phones and Macs is clunky and reliant on third-party software. More impressi...

Oppo’s Find N5 feels like the end game for foldable phones. Not because it’s make or break for a segment of the phone market that never quite took off like manufacturers hoped it would, but because I simply don’t know where we go from here. There’s scarcely room to make the phone thinner without ditching USB-C entirely; battery life, performance, and even cameras are now on par with other flagship phones; and this time, Oppo even managed to fit wireless charging and water resistance in, too. This is what we were promised all along. Now what? Hardware and cameras It’s hard to see how the hardware improves much further. At 8.93mm thick when closed, this is the thinnest foldable in the world, shaving almost half a millimeter off the previous record holder, Honor’s Magic V3 . It’s just 4.21mm thin when it’s open, which proves there’s still space to trim — Huawei’s trifold Mate XT runs to just 3.6mm — but we’re close to at least one hard physical limit. Oppo t...

The Find N5 is thinner than any other foldable when shut. Oppo has launched the Find N5, the thinnest foldable phone in the world. It’s launching in markets worldwide, including across Europe and Asia, at $2,499 SGD (about $1,867 USD). That’s more expensive than either the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 6 or Google Pixel 9 Pro Fold in Singapore, though comparable once you adjust for storage. There won’t be any US release at all though, as sister brand OnePlus has already confirmed that it has no plans to launch a foldable phone this year. The Find N5 is slimmer than any rival foldable, so long as you measure it when closed. At 8.93mm it’s thinner than the previous record holder, last year’s Honor Magic V3 , and less than a millimeter thicker than an iPhone 16 Pro. Open the phone up and it’s just 4.21mm at its thinnest point — so thin that Oppo told me it had to customize the USB-C port to even fit — though measured this way it is fractionally thicker than Huawei’s 3.6mm trifold Mate XT, wh...

Twitch is planning to cull some of the content archived by streamers to save on storage costs. On Wednesday the streaming platform announced that it will introduce a 100-hour storage cap for Highlights and Uploads starting April 19th, warning that users will have their content automatically deleted until it falls below the limit. Twitch says it’s doing this because “Highlights haven’t been very effective in driving discovery or engagement,” and it isn’t worth the cost of storing thousands of hours of such content. Twitch is owned by Amazon, a market-leading cloud storage provider — a detail that hasn’t gone unnoticed by streamers criticizing the decision. The update only applies to Highlights — specific snippets edited from recordings of live broadcasts (VODs) using the Highlighter tool to showcase the streamer’s best moments — and uploaded footage created using third-party services. Other kinds of on-demand content, including Clips and VODs (the latter of which are already automat...

At least it’s a nice-looking paperweight. Ten days from now, the Humane AI Pin will be able to tell you how much battery it has left, and essentially nothing else. To be fair, though, it couldn’t do that much before. And it doesn’t matter anyway, because you almost certainly didn’t buy one. But if you did, that’s the bad news: Humane is shutting down the AI Pin — almost exactly a year after it first started shipping the little chest-mounted device — and has sold some of its remnant technology to HP. The details here are brutal for everyone involved. The $116 million HP is paying pales next to the $230 million the company raised since it was founded in 2018. (There was a rumor last spring that Humane was trying to sell to HP for somewhere near $1 billion .) The company’s founders, Bethany Bongiorno and Imran Chaudhri, have now gone from celebrated Apple product makers to… working on AI stuff for HP’s printers and conference room gadgets. Pin owners will be stuck ...

Eufy’s newest smart lock adds palm unlock and a digital peephole. Anker’s smart home arm, Eufy, has announced its first smart lock that uses palm vein recognition to unlock your door. The $399 FamiLock S3 Max is also a video doorbell with a 2K-capable camera and an interior screen that shows a live video feed through the door lock. The S3 works over Wi-Fi 6 and supports Matter for integration with most smart home ecosystems, including Apple Home and Amazon Alexa. Palm unlock is a new biometric feature on residential locks, joining fingerprint unlock and facial recognition as new ways to access our homes. Philips , TCL , and TP-Link Tapo all recently launched models that unlock by waving your hand over an infrared sensor. Research shows that palm vein recognition is more accurate and secure than fingerprint readers, in part because it works by recognizing that blood is flowing through your veins. Most people who want a smart lock for their home probably aren’t worried about ...

Microsoft was planning to make some changes to the way you sign in to a Microsoft account in February, keeping accounts signed in automatically unless you sign out or use private browsing. While the changes were communicated to Outlook.com users through a notification and in a now-removed Microsoft support article , Microsoft has now confirmed to The Verge that this was a mistake. “There will be no changes to Microsoft users’ commercial (Microsoft Entra) or consumer (Microsoft account) sign in experiences in February,” confirms Alex Simons, corporate vice president of identity & network access program management at Microsoft, in a statement to The Verge . “Media reports were based on incomplete information mistakenly published by a Microsoft product team. The incorrect notifications have been removed.” Microsoft hasn’t clarified when it plans to eventually roll out these changes after the mistaken notifications, but once they arrive it means you’ll no longer be asked if you wa...

Elon Musk’s xAI unveiled Grok-3 on Tuesday, announcing that the new artificial intelligence model has “more than 10 times” the compute power of its predecessor. xAI said its latest flagship outperforms OpenAI’s GPT-4o, Google’s Gemini, and DeepSeek’s V3 models in early testing, and now features “advanced reasoning” capabilities. So-called reasoning models are trained to answer more complex questions by breaking instructions down into smaller tasks and attempting to fact-check themselves before offering a solution, with the aim of providing stronger results. Similar models have been developed by rival companies, including OpenAI’s o1 , DeepSeek’s R1, and Google’s Gemini Flash Thinking . There are two Grok-3 reasoning modes available: “Think”, which will display Grok’s reasoning as it resolves requests; and “Big Brain” for complex tasks that require more computational power. xAI is also launching a Grok AI agent product called Deep Search, which the company describes as a “next gener...

The Nintendo Switch 2 has finally been announced , and it will launch sometime in 2025. It’s bigger than the original Switch, has Joy-Cons that attach to the side of the console , and will be getting a new Mario Kart game — beyond that, Nintendo hasn’t shared a lot more. But the company is planning a Nintendo Switch 2-focused Direct on April 2nd . The first Nintendo Switch will be a tough act to follow. With more than 130 million units sold, the hybrid tablet has become the company’s bestselling console to date, besting the Wii , and slowly but surely approaching the DS handheld. Nintendo infamously followed the Wii with the ill-fated Wii U before turning things around with the Switch. And the console went out on a high note following the release of blockbusters The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom and Super Mario Bros. Wonder . It seems like the Switch 2 is primed to carry on that legacy, but hopefully we don’t have to wait too much longer after that April Direct for an o...

Violent metaphors abound for what’s happening in Washington : Elon Musk and his allies have taken a “slash-and-burn†approach to the government and a “sledgehammer†to government institutions, doing away with supposed waste and excess while leaving the fundamental structure intact. All of this is being done with the stated goal of ridding the federal workforce of the scourge of wokeness and “DEI†— diversity, equity, and inclusion, a term that has become a catchall for anything Musk and other MAGA insiders don’t like. USAID is DEI. The National Institutes of Health is DEI. The National Endowment for the Arts? Obviously DEI. We can probably all agree that the woke word cloud at the FBI Academy in Quantico is DEI. Major broadcasters are pushing DEI on their viewers; public school teachers are using it to indoctrinate impressionable young students. The only solution to this is, of course, to defund and dismantle everything. The war on DEI is a smoke screen; it’s an o...

X users are currently unable to post links to Signal.me, which are used to quickly and securely send direct messages to Signal users. A variety of failure notifications are being reported when X users attempt to post Signal links on the platform, some of which identify the blocked message as containing spam, harmful content, or malicious activity.  When my colleague tried, he was met with an error message saying “something went wrong, but don’t fret — let’s give it another shot.” The issue was first reported by Matt Binder , who notes that only Signal.me links appear to be impacted. Links to the Signal.org domain do not appear to be blocked, nor do similar services like Telegram. Signal is notably used by journalists to receive confidential information from sources, reassured by the knowledge that messages are end-to-end encrypted and stored on-device. The messaging service has become especially relevant in recent weeks as a tool for federal whistleblowers to report DOGE activit...

The New York Times has reportedly approved artificial intelligence tools that newsroom staff can use for editing copy, summarizing information, coding, and writing. The publication announced in an internal email that product and editorial staff will receive AI training, according to Semafor , and introduced a new internal AI tool called Echo for summarizing articles, briefings, and other company activity. Staff were reportedly sent new editorial guidelines detailing permitted uses for Echo and other AI tools, which encourage newsroom employees to use them to suggest edits and revisions for their work, and generate summaries, promotional copy for social media, and SEO headlines. Other examples mentioned in a mandatory training video shared with staff include using AI to develop news quizzes, quote cards, and FAQs, or suggesting what questions reporters should ask a start-up’s CEO during an interview. There are restrictions, however — the company told editorial staff that AI shouldn’...

DeepSeek is shaking up the AI industry with cost-efficient large language models it claims can perform just as well as rivals from giants like OpenAI and Meta. The Chinese startup says its flagship R1 reasoning model is capable of achieving “performance comparable” to OpenAI’s o1 equivalent , while the newly released Janus Pro multimodal AI model can supposedly outperform Stable Diffusion and DALL-E 3. DeepSeek’s ChatGPT competitor quickly soared to the top of the App Store , and the company is disrupting financial markets , with shares of Nvidia dipping 17 percent to cut nearly $600 billion from its market cap on January 27th, which CNBC said is the biggest single-day drop in US history. The AI assistant is powered by the startup’s “state-of-the-art” DeepSeek-V3 model, allowing users to ask questions, plan trips, generate text, and more. As downloads of DeepSeek’s app spiked, the startup began restricting signups due to “malicious attacks.” Launched in 2023 by Liang Wenfeng, ...

BMW’s Vision Driving Experience is a test mule for its Neue Klasse platform. | Image: BMW Last November, I strapped into the rear passenger seat of an all-electric, four-door sedan with BMW test driver and 24-hour racer Jens Klingmann behind the wheel. It was a cold day at BMW’s Performance Driving Center in Greer, SC, and beneath the five-point harnesses, roll cage, and heavily camouflaged body, Klingmann had an unexpected co-pilot: a tiny black box called the “Heart of Joy.†It was an odd name for an interesting suite of tech features powering my brief three-lap stint on the 1.7-mile performance track. The Heart of Joy represents an interesting future for the German brand that still wants to be known as the “Ultimate Driving Machine†in the electrified future.  The VDX The vehicle we rode in is called the Vision Driving Experience (VDX), a one-off built specifically for testing this supposedly magic black box, as well as more upcoming features for BMW’s Neue Kla...

Days after YouTube published a blog post saying it could lose Paramount content soon, it updated the post to announce a deal to keep it. The company posted on X that, as a result, channels such as CBS, CBS Sports, and Nickelodeon and add-ons like Paramount Plus, Showtime, and BET Plus will stick around after all. The company had said in its post on February 12th that it would offer an $8 credit if Paramount content was “unavailable for an extended period of time,” but updated the next day to say talks had been extended. YouTube TV didn’t elaborate further on its new deal or how it could affect pricing. Responding to questions on X about whether it will raise prices as a result of the deal, the TeamYouTube account replied , “We take these decisions very seriously & will be sure to communicate any potential changes in the future before they happen.” Members, we’re happy to share that we’ve reached a deal to continue carrying Paramount content on YouTube TV. That means you sti...

Hi, friends! Welcome to Installer No. 71, your guide to the best and Verge -iest stuff in the world. (If you’re new here, welcome, happy long weekend to all those allowed to celebrate, and also you can read all the old editions at the Installer homepage .)  This week, I’ve been reading about Alan Turing and OnlyFans and street booze and convenience stores , dusting off my Fortnite skills for the first time in a while, reading The Ministry of Time , working up the courage to make air fryer donuts , trying out a Sony ZV-1 M2 as my webcam, catching up on The White Lotus before season 3 starts, trying Anybox as a bookmarking / note-taking app, and seeing if the Simplify Gmail extension will make me like email more.  I also have for you a place to watch all the best SNL sketches, a great new pair of Beats headphones, a new drawing tablet for creators of all kinds, a fun-sounding sci-fi movie on Apple TV Plus, and much more. Oh, and thanks to everyone who sent in...

The Vision Pro is Apple’s newest computing platform, and that means we’re going to see a whole bunch of new apps. Apple pitches apps built for the Vision Pro as “spatial” experiences, and even after our initial review experience , we’ll have to see how those differ from or improve upon the virtual reality and mixed reality experiences we’ve seen on other platforms. Of course, the Vision Pro can run iPhone and iPad apps, too , and display the screen of your nearby Mac laptop or desktop. Apple says that the Vision Pro’s 600-plus apps available at launch will bring 3D movies from Disney Plus , support from apps like Max and Amazon Prime video, and games like What the Golf? and Super Fruit Ninja . But the walled gardens of today’s tech world work in both directions, and there are some notable day-one omissions — Netflix’s app won’t work on Apple’s headset , and the same goes for YouTube . The Vision Pro launches on February 2nd , and there are sure to be some good, bad, and flat-out ...

Boredom is something of a dying concept. Our phones, filled with games and videos and social feeds, allow us to fill every moment with something , whether we’re on a long flight or in line for 30 seconds waiting for coffee. But the silly and playful While Waiting is a good reminder that that can be a good thing — an opportunity for our minds to wander in unexpected directions. Possibly the best way to describe While Waiting is that it’s what would happen if WarioWare also tried to tell the story of a human life. Which means that it’s a collection of extremely short, often weird minigames that all fit together to follow the story of a singular character through moments of waiting. It starts right from the beginning: the first thing you’re asked to do is wait to be born. From there, you jump through time via idle moments. You have to wait for the commercials to end while watching a show with your parents, or wait to fall asleep while lying in bed, or wait for the water to...

My first time playing Elden Ring Nightreign , I was stressed the hell out. My team and I were in an underground dungeon, trying to make our way past traps and dangerous blind corners, all while knowing there was an invisible clock ominously ticking down above our heads. If we were still underground when it hit zero a deadly storm called Night’s Tide would close in, potentially trapping us. That kind of anxiety was exactly what Elden Ring combat designer and Nightreign ’s game director Junya Ishizaki had in mind. Speaking with Ishizaki after my time with the game, I was surprised to learn one of the main inspirations for Nightreign – a co-op focused PvE action game – was the board game Pandemic . Ishizaki said that one of the things he enjoyed about Pandemic , which he later incorporated into Nightreign , was the idea of playing under pressure. “When you come up against these seemingly insurmountable odds, it’s up to the player to choose how to use their time in order to o...

The open source code repository Codeberg has blamed the far right for a recent campaign of abuse and harassment across its systems. “Projects advocating tolerance and equal rights” were subjected to spam campaigns using abusive messages, which escalated to spam emails sent to users via Codeberg’s own automated systems. Codeberg says it stands strong “against hate and hatred” that endangers free software projects. On February 12th, some Codeberg users received emails from Codeberg containing abusive content. The site says that this was sent by an abuser who took advantage of the site’s ability to notify up to 100 users at once, generating a notification email each time. Codeberg says that while it has blocked both the accounts and the functionality they used, “a large amount of notification emails” had already been sent, and the site itself experienced brief downtime. “Your private data was not leaked,” Codeberg reassures users in a statement . “All emails have been generated through...

We’re likely still a long way out from Bethesda’s next Elder Scrolls game . But that wait isn’t such a big deal when the Xbox has other excellent roleplaying games like Avowed . The latest from Fallout: New Vegas and The Outer Worlds developer Obsidian, Avowed doesn’t shake up the genre. It’s just a really solid fantasy RPG, one that keeps you pushing through with a combination of epic story, delightful companions, difficult decisions, and a true sense of adventure in a massive world. The game puts you in the role of a godlike, a race of rare human-like creatures believed to have been blessed by — and thus are close to — the many gods that exist in this world. You’re immediately put to work investigating a deadly plague that is impacting a region known as The Living Lands. It’s an ecological disaster, slowly killing people (after it causes them to go mad) while also being responsible for everything from gigantic sinkholes to very angry bears. Avowed is actuall...

Guess who’s back. Apple has resumed advertising on X for the first time since pausing ads more than a year ago.  The company was one of many to halt advertisements over concerns for brand safety following Elon Musk’s purchase of the social network. While X’s approach to content moderation has changed little since then, Big Tech’s relationship with Musk has shifted since President Donald Trump took office. MacRumors spotted on Wednesday that the Apple and AppleTV accounts are respectively running promotions for Safari’s privacy features and the Apple TV Plus show Severance on the social media platform. The iPhone maker was reportedly debating whether to test ads on X again in January.  Apple was among several major advertisers , including Amazon, Disney, Comcast, Warner Bros. Discovery, and IBM, to pull out of the platform in November 2023 over concerns regarding controversial remarks about antisemitic conspiracy theories and white pride made by X owner Elon Musk. ...

Crytek is laying off around 15 percent of its 400 employees, affecting development teams and shared services. The announcement comes months after Crytek put the development of its next Crysis game “on hold” in Q3, 2024. “Like so many of our peers, we aren’t immune to the complex, unfavorable market dynamics that have hit our industry these past several years,” says Crytek in a statement. “It pains us greatly to share today that we must lay off an estimated 15 percent of our around 400 employees.” Crytek has been shifting developers over to Hunt: Showdown 1896 , its multiplayer extraction shooter. “While Hunt: Showdown 1896 is still growing, Crytek cannot continue as before and remain financially sustainable,” says Crytek. “We firmly believe in the future of Crytek. With Hunt: Showdown 1896 , we have a very strong gaming service and remain fully committed to its operation.“ pic.twitter.com/zJzGroAIex — Crytek (@Crytek) February 12, 2025 Crysis 4 was originally announced t...

New look, new dial. Wacom has completely overhauled its Intuos Pro drawing tablets to make them more compact, convenient, and customizable for creative professionals. This is the biggest redesign for the Intuos Pro lineup since its introduction in 2013, featuring a new layout that relocates user controls from the side to the top of the tablet and replaces the previous touch ring with mechanical dials. It’s a huge change, but one I quickly welcomed in the short time I had to test it myself. The Intuos Pro is Wacom’s pen tablet targeting industry creatives like 3D artists, illustrators, and photo editors who prefer to work on their own (typically calibrated) displays. Unlike Wacom’s Cintiq or One range , the Intuos Pro doesn’t have a built-in screen, making it easier to throw into a bag and connect to computing devices. There are three sizes available: Small (€269.99), Medium (€399.99), and Large (€549.99). I’ll update with US pricing when it goes live later today. Each model is a...